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Edited by Robert Bruce Thurber
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Vol. xxxvi11, No. §
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
May, 7929
Getting Nowhere, or Somewhere
HOUSANDS of people, marooned on housetops
in a recent Alabama flood, moaned and cried
and screamed in anguish for fear of being drowned,
till they could be heard miles away. But this is an
incident compared with the despairing wails of men
everywhere who have lost faith and assurance out
of their lives. They are legion, especially among the
higher classes, and they are increasing every day.
Typical of the many who not only wander in their
minds about where they are and what life means,
but also get their woes into print, is a man, lately
deceased, who wrote one of a series of personal
experiences with religion which are appearing from
time to time in the Outlook and Independent. Listen
to him:
““Man, alone in the desert of a vast and unknow-
able awesomeness, has hung himself around with
cozy explanations within which he may live un-
terrified. Now, for more than half a lifetime, I have
been fumbling my way with impatient curiosity
through these lovely illusions, and I came out, at
last, on a sublimity of ignorance more uplifting than
faith and as bottomless as despair. I have arrived
nowhere, I am back where primitive man was when
he began to invent his first religion. And I cannot
invent one.”
Yet, in the face of this admission of absolute
futility in his own life, he exalts to the skies his
present system of belief, despises the fundamentals
of Christianity, and makes all men gods, including
himself, in these words: Man ‘‘may not know
where he is, or whither he is bound, but he is on his
way. He comes out of mystery; he moves in the
midst of mystery; and there is nothing but mystery
ahead of his hope. But surely the universe should
be proud of him, and he should be proud of himself.”
If this man, or the many like him, has believed
for half a lifetime that man invented his own religion,
that he lived in self-made illusions, then he never
had faith, and is in no position to repudiate it and
to aver that ignorance of it is more uplifting. It is
passing strange that such men ridicule God's
paradoxes and point with scorn to what they think
are contradictions in the Bible, yet will cling to
something that is at the same time uplifting and as
bottomless as despair. Has consistency passed out?
When a man by his own willfulness, pride of
superior intelligence, and belief in evolution, loses
faith out of his life, he is of all men most miserable
and unreasoning. He turns and rails at the faith
he has lost, and thereby proves its worth.
The trouble is that these traducers of religion are
lambasting a straw man. They are striking out at a
religion that is not Christianity at all, but supersti-
tion and tradition. They think that the Bible teach-
ing of God is that He is an old man with a white
beard, stern and véngeful, yet withal loving by
caprice; that the Bible teaches that the earth is
flat and the sky is a blue dome a few miles high;
that the fear of God is the sort of fear that poisons
the body; that a child must obey parents regardless
of right principles; that we should inhibit all angry
feelings; that we should not be self-reliant; that we
should crucify all sex satisfaction; that church should
rule state; and that religion despises intelligence.
The wild and bloody French Revolution was
directed against the teachings and practices of the
Church, which the people had been made to believe
were the teachings and practices of Christ. So
today intelligent men are railing at what they
imagine are Christian ideas and customs, but which
are only rubbish that has been piled up around the
Cross. They find fault with religionists for attacking
science when they are ignorant of science, yet they
themselves ignorantly attack religion.
To the wanderers in the mazes of uncertainty we
would say in all kindness of heart: Get somewhere.
Strip the religion of Christ of its accumulated accre-
tions; get back to His person and words and acts.
Ask God for faith in these. They will appeal to your
highest intelligence, answer every longing, fit you to
cope with life, prepare you for death, and assure
you of a resurrection to life everlasting.
We know, for we have experienced.
Entered as second-class matter, January 19,1909, at the post office at Nashville, Tenn., under act of March 3, 1879, by the Southern Publishing Association,
(Seventh-day Adventist), 2119 24th Ave. N. Published monthly (except October, when semi-monthly). Price 25 cents a copy, $1.00 a year.
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THE WATCHMAN MAGAZINE